Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Web pages and applications are largely identified through implementation of web search engines and application search engines, respectively. However, techniques to identify distributed user interface (DUI) elements have not received much attention, specifically how a client may identify DUI elements with which they may want to populate their personal devices, widget panels, web pages, and the like.
A prevalent feature of a DUI system is the ability to link together multiple DUI elements so that a control panel and/or a collection can perform actions that a single application may not be able accomplish alone, such as by remotely operating multiple applications. For example, a user may set up an image processing macro to paste and modify a picture in an image processing program and then export a button via a DUI add-on, an operating system (OS) function, or an overlay framework. A user may then group the button with another button that captures an image (for example, from a hardware camera or a web page) and copy the other button to the clipboard. Using both buttons may enable the user to effectively capture an image from a first source using a first interface element, deliver the image as a source to a second interface element, and transpire with the output from the second interface element. However, without pre-loading or similar identification of various DUI elements, the user may not be able to find, implement, and link different DUI elements suitable for particular scenarios based on device configurations, network connections, application types, etc.